Psychologyresearch.org.uk

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news: The Economist discusses whether the famous Dunbar number, the maximum limit of human relationships , holds on Facebook. A person who experienced the identity loss memory disorder dissociative fugue is interviewed in The New York Times . BBC News reports that Malaysia is attempting to curb its suicide rate by planning to arrest those who attempt suicide. Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel asks what is an illusion , exactly? Neuronarrative reports on a new study finding people tend to view leaders more favourably once they’ve died! Drug giant and makers of Seroquel (quetiapine) lied about their data showing that the antipsychotic drug isn’t as effective as its competitors, reports the Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry blog. The New York Times reports on research showing that interrupting an experience, whether dreary or pleasant, can make it significantly more intense. The US Army’s group of ‘weaponised anthropologists’, the Human Terrain System, get slammed by a Marine Corps major in a military publication. Wired has the story. The Onion , on news that a Lovecraftian school board member wants madness added to the curriculum. C’thulhu fhtagn! Science News reports on a new study that links the genetics of Autism and bellyaches. A long and confusing article on why minds are not like computers is published in The New Atlantis . Would greatly benefit from the insights from philosophy of mind. Nature has an excellent article on the sociology of science and why we need a third way after the extremes of hard scientific realism and social constructionism. By the always interesting Harry Collins. Gender effects in children’s play are seen in virtual worlds, reports Science News . Furious Seasons reports on a recent study looking at the (large) placebo effect in studies of antidepressant treatment for adolescent depression. Is patriotism a subconscious way for humans to avoid disease? asks the always engaging Carl Zimmer in Discover Magazine . The Guardian reports on research suggesting that some people who suffer stroke develop PTSD after their experience. Texting is associated with superior reading skills in children, reports the BPS Research Digest . The New York Times has an interesting article looking at the psychology of rewarding students for study or good performance in light of mixed evidence of how effective the practice is. ABC Radio National’s Ockham’s Razor has programme on how errors of grammar, punctuation and inaccurate scientific terminology can complicate important social issues. Dr Shock covers some interesting research on the pros and cons on using PowerPoint presentations in teaching for learning by students. Also from Dr Shock an awesome video showing how some stunning 3D illusion street art was created. The New York Times reports that skin cells from people with Parkinson’s disease have been converted in a test tube to dopamine neurons.

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2009-03-06 Spike activity

Neural Markers of Religious Conviction : Many people derive peace of mind and purpose in life from their belief in God. For others, however, religion provides unsatisfying answers. Are there brain differences between believers and nonbelievers? Here we show that religious conviction is marked by reduced reactivity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a cortical system that is involved in the experience of anxiety and is important for self-regulation. In two studies, we recorded electroencephalographic neural reactivity in the ACC as participants completed a Stroop task. Results showed that stronger religious zeal and greater belief in God were associated with less firing of the ACC in response to error and with commission of fewer errors. These correlations remained strong even after we controlled for personality and cognitive ability. These results suggest that religious conviction provides a framework for understanding and acting within one’s environment, thereby acting as a buffer against anxiety and minimizing the experience of error. ScienceDaily has more: Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

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God makes you chill [Gene Expression]

I’m interesting in creating a list of people on Twitter that Mind Hacks readers might be interested in: psychologists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, AI hackers, anthropologists, sociologists, science writers, philosophers – you know the sort. However, it seems quite hard to track down people by their interests. So if you follow, or are, someone who posts lots of interesting mind and brain stuff on Twitter, leave a comment on this post, or email me using this web form with Twitter in the title. My only caveat is I’m not particularly interested in, for example, a psychologist who mostly twitters about their cat, the news, sport or whatever. They need to be a good source of mind and brain insights. I’ll filter the list and post it up here.

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Finding a Twitter flock

Here are links to some old posts about psychology and advertising. About three years ago I was writing a lot about this, and I just thought I’d collect them here: Longer posts: Is there a science of advertising? Decoding adverisements Cognitive psychology & advertising Music wine and will advertising influences familiarity induces preference neuroscience and advertising where do implicit associations come from? Book review: Influence (by Robert Cialdini) Does advertising erode free will? ‘Briefly noted’ and links the price is right regardless of the cost When choice is demotivating Experimental psychology of advertising resources Why can’t we choose what makes us happy The Endowment effect and marketing A quick and miscellaneous list of advertising links

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Psychology and advertising

Fora.TV has a great video discussion with science writer Jonah Lehrer where he gives a wonderfully engaging talk on the on decision making, meta-cognition and the paradox of choice. The discussion is an hour long and well worth the time, although for those with pathological impatience or only five minutes to spare, the section on metacognition is a particular highlight. I also notice from his blog that he’s also just reviewed a recent book on consciousness and embodied cognition called ‘Out of Our Heads’ by philosopher Alva Noë for the San Francisco Chronicle which is also worth checking out. Link to Fora.TV interview with Lehrer (thanks Rich!)

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Where is my mind?

Both objects and behaviour can be described as disgusting. The term could equally apply to someone who cheats other people out of money as it could to the sight of rancid food or the taste of sour milk. That’s not just a linguistic quirk. Some scientists believe that the revulsion we feel towards immoral behaviour isn’t based on our vaunted mental abilities, but on ancient impulses that evolved to put us off toxic or infectious foods. It seems that your facial muscles agree. Hanah Chapman from the University of Toronto has found that both physical and moral disgust cause the levator labii muscles, which run from your eyes to your mouth, to contract. The result: you wrinkle your nose and you purse your lips. Nasty tastes, gross photos and foul play all cause the same physical reaction and the same subjective emotions. When people say that moral transgressions “leave a bad taste in your mouth”, it’s more than just a pretty metaphor. Chapman began by studying disgust in its more primitive forms – reactions to foul tastes. She recruited 27 volunteers and recorded the electrical activity in their levator labii muscles as they drank small vials of various liquids. If the concoctions were unpleasantly salty, sour or bitter, this group of muscles contracted more strongly than if the liquids were sweet or flavourless. These reactions were a good measure of their subjective opinions – the more distasteful they found the drinks, the more strongly their muscles contracted. Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

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A bad taste in your mouth – moral outrage has origins in physical disgust [Not Exactly Rocket Science]

Last week, we presented research by Miranda Scolari’s team about visual expertise and visual short-term memory. Their conclusion: “experts” don’t have a larger visual memory capacity than non-experts, they just have the ability to process more details. Scolari’s team was working under the assumption that all humans (or at least all the students in their experiment) are face-recognition experts. It’s true: we’re amazingly good at recognizing faces we’ve seen before. Think how much easier it is to remember a face you’ve seen than it is to remember the name that goes with the face. But surely we can be visual experts in other types of objects besides faces, right? Otherwise Scolari’s study would apply to faces and nothing else. To find out, a team led by Kim Curby did a similar study, using car experts instead of face experts. They tested 36 volunteers on their knowledge of cars by showing them photos of cars from two different years; they had to say whether the cars were they same or different model. The highest scorers were the experts, and the lowest scorers were “novices.” Curby’s memory-test was similar to the example I showed you last week: Take a look at this quick video. You’ll see a set of six small images, arranged in a circle, for 1 second. Then the screen will go blank for 1 second. Finally, one image will reappear in the place of one of the first six pictures. Your job: indicate whether the final image is the same or different as the image that originally appeared in that same spot. Click here to view the movie (QuickTime required) But there were a few differences. First, Curby’s team asked viewers to repeat a pair of numbers like “7 2″ while they watched the video. Second, half the time the viewers saw faces, and half the time they saw cars (both of which sometimes appeared upright, and sometimes upside-down). Finally, viewers saw the images for varying lengths of time: either 0.5 seconds, 2.5 seconds, or 4 seconds, instead of the 1-second viewing time in my example and the Scolari et al. study. Here are the results for faces: Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

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What is a visual expert? [Cognitive Daily]

Having trouble with a word puzzle? Suffering from writer’s block? Perhaps you’re not looking at the right colour… We encounter many of the colours in our lives under the same circumstances and as a result, we have come to associate certain colours with specific attributes. Red invokes thoughts of action, danger or mistakes because it is a common feature of warning signs and editorial ink. Blue, however, is a more soothing hue, and its presence in both sky and sea have connected it to peace and openness. These associations aren’t trivial ones – they can affect the way we think. In a clever series of experiments, Ravi Mehta and Rui Zhu from the University of British Columbia found that red makes people averse to risks, more vigilant and more attentive to detail. Blue hues, on the other hand, encourage them to explore and try new things, and boosts creative thinking. These influences come through in tasks as simple as solving anagrams and memorising words,   and as complex and realistic as creating a child’s toy. To begin with, Mehta and Zhu checked that the associations they ascribed to the two colours were right. They asked people to list things they connect with different colours and found that 70% of their red associations were related to danger or mistakes, while 60% of their blue ones were to do with safety or peace. Idea confirmed, Mehta and Zhu went on to show that these feelings trigger different motivations – dangerous red says “Avoid,” while tranquil blue says “Approach.” Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

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Colouring your mind – red improves attention to detail, blue boosts creativity [Not Exactly Rocket Science]

The new edition of the excellent Scientific American Mind has just hit the shelves and several of the feature articles are freely available online – covering the psychology of play, some fascinating new research on the placebo effect, the quest to build a brain scan lie detector and several other fantastic reports. I found the article on the cognitive benefits of free play particularly interesting. In this instance ‘free play’ is where kids are playing without set rules or requirements, as are needed when playing structured games or doing tasks. The article is full of intriguing studies that indicate the immediate and long-term benefits of imaginative play. Even rough-and-tumble seems to be associated with better social skills: Play fighting also improves problem solving. According to a paper published by Pellegrini in 1989, the more elementary school boys engaged in rough-housing, the better they scored on a test of social problem solving. During the test, researchers presented kids with five pictures of a child trying to get a toy from a peer and five pictures of a child trying to avoid being reprimanded by his mother. The subjects were then asked to come up with as many possible solutions to each social problem; their score was based on the variety of strategies they mentioned, and children who play-fought regularly tended to score much better. As well as checking out the latest issue of SciAmMind , you may also want to have a look at a fantastic online gallery they’ve put together which captures numerous visual illusions that have been realised as 3D sculpures, some of epic proportions. If you want to see some of M.C. Escher’s impossible staircases rendered in lego, or several impressive sculptures that change depending on the light or viewing angle, do have a look. Link to Feb 2009 SciAmMind with plenty of freely available articles. Link to visual illusions sculpture gallery.

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New SciAmMind on play, placebo, lies and illusion

Although much of The Telegraph’s science coverage seems to have gone down the pan recently, they’ve just published a remarkably well balanced and informative article on war trauma and how it is associated with measurable changes in brain structure. Brain imaging studies have found that people with post-traumatic stress disorder tend to have smaller hippocampi, an area known to be key for emotional memory. But it’s not clear whether this is a direct consequence of PTSD, or simply that people with smaller hippocampi are more likely to develop the disorder after trauma. The article does a fantastic job of presenting a balanced look at the causality hypnotheses, and quotes psychiatrist Simon Wessely , known for his research on the psychology, neuroscience and history of combat trauma. But Prof Wessely has found that the very thing that exposes soldiers to PTSD might also help them deal with it: their job. According to his research at King’s, group cohesion and firm leadership are critical in reducing the impact of psychological distress. “You have to remember we are talking about professional soldiers who have been highly trained,” he says. “Their training is designed to harden them against the unpleasant nature of war. The military is actually very effective at reducing the risk of PTSD with their training, their professionalism, esprit de corps and morale. War is a stressful business and this all prepares soldiers for that.” The flip side is that the memories that provoke trauma are not necessarily those of gruesome battles or injuries. “The kind of events that affect them are not simply seeing bad things and coming under fire – it is when the rules they have come to expect are somehow broken. It is when errors of omission or commission lead to the feeling they have been let down, or that they have let their comrades down, that mental health problems occur. This is why ‘friendly fire’ incidents are so psychologically damaging – it violates the soldiers’ rules of who is supposed to be shooting at them. They will feel anger at those responsible.” The only bizarre bit is the second to last paragraph where it mentions “new treatment is being developed, drawing on neurolinguistic programming, relaxation techniques and even Eye Movement Desensitisation Therapy”. It mentions EMDR as if it is something unusual, when it is an increasing well researched evidence-based treatment, and NLP as if it is nothing out-of-the-ordinary, when it is largely pseudoscience that lacks even the most basic empirical support. Link to ‘How brain scans show the trauma of war’.

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War trauma and brain impact